Janis: Little Girl Blue

What’s the best way to get back at an asshole fraternity for voting you the “ugliest man on campus?” For Janis Joplin, it was to catapult to stardom, hang out with the Dead, perform at the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock, and be recognized as the grooviest, most out there female in music. 2015 is the year of the deceased musician’s documentary. Amy Berg’s Janis: Little Girl Blue follows on the heels of Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, Amy, and What Happened, Miss Simone? Even though I came of age in the time of Nirvana and experienced Amy Winehouse’s rapid rise and fall in my late 20s, this examination of Janis Joplin, an artist way before my time, makes it clear she was more than a drug overdose.

Janis was a white person singing the blues and a woman in a man’s world. In one quick cut away during the Monterey Pop Festival, there is Mama Cass clearly mouthing the word, “Wow” after Janis finishes crushing the crowd on stage. Comparison makers liken Janis to Aretha Franklin and Billie Holiday, but Janis knew enough to slap those similarities to the floor. She didn’t sing like Billie and would need years upon years to approach Aretha’s vocal tones. Janis taught herself to sing from Bessie Smith records and borrowed whole-heartedly from Otis Redding. Wherever she developed that recognizable throat scream is lost to history I suppose, because Berg doesn’t tell us here.

Unlike plenty of her contemporaries, Janis’s parents did not set her up for failure. She was part of a run-of-the-mill nuclear family from Port Arthur, Texas. Two younger siblings appear to be stable and just fine today as their interviews show. Yet, Janis was a square peg not only in her family, but in her whole town. She was a progressive confined to a conservative stronghold. Maligned for three straight years in high school for supporting the idea of integration, Janis then dropped out of college and took off for San Francisco, a city she convinced herself she would flourish in.

Amy Berg is a social issue documentarian (Deliver Us from Evil, West of Memphis) so Janis is a break from her M.O. Rather than pedophile priests and miscarriages of justice, we get Janis’s trouble with love, booze, and narcotics. Berg weaves the heroin use in and out of Janis’s life story but doesn’t really hit it until the end. It’s Janis’s quest for love and acceptance through a cavalcade of interview footage, pictures, and videos which fills up most of the film. Country Joe McDonald shows up and says they were not in a relationship, just friends, a claim contrary to Janis’s letters. Bob Weir says he was kept up many nights with Janis’s loud lovemaking with Pigpen, and Dick Cavett says he doesn’t remember if he and Janis ever went all the way or not. Bullshit Dick.

There are some missing pieces including a few hints at Janis’s bisexuality, a subject Berg just about runs away from, what was up with all the furs and gargantuan feather boas, and Janis’s reluctance to identify herself with feminism or any other –ism for that matter. We hear Janis briefly talk about being a girl in a man’s world, but whether or not she was trying to break down barriers is up to the viewer. I think she was just there for the music. Not everyone jived with Janis’s groove though, including her parents. Dad didn’t understand what she was doing, but wished her well and mom said she could be such a lovely singer if she wanted to be. I can only assume she followed that sentence up with ‘and why can’t she find a nice boy to settle down with too.’ It’s a fool’s errand to guess how Janis would have turned out had she survived past 27. All we know is that Janis loved the blues, loved life, felt deeply, and that Amy Berg creates a fascinating study of a musician sometimes overshadowed by her fellow untimely death peers such as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain.